The invention relates to devices and methods for the acquisition of ion mobility spectra in ion mobility spectrometers which apply gas flows to push trapped ions over electric field barriers. Mass spectrometers can only ever determine the ratio of the ion mass to the charge of the ion. Where the terms “mass of an ion” or “ion mass” are used below for simplification, they always refer to the ratio of the mass m to the dimensionless number of elementary charges z of the ion. This charge-related mass m/z has the physical dimension of a mass; it is often also called “mass-to-charge ratio”, although this is dimensionally incorrect. “Ion species” shall denote ions having the same elemental composition, the same charge and the same three-dimensional structure. Ion species generally comprise all the ions of an isotope group, which consist of ions of slightly different masses.
Different kinds of isomers are known for bioorganic molecules: isomers related to the primary structure (structural isomers) and isomers related to the secondary or tertiary structure (conformational isomers). These isomers have different geometrical forms but exactly the same mass. It is therefore impossible to differentiate between them on the basis of their mass. Some information as to the structure can be obtained from fragment ion mass spectra; however, an efficient and certain way to recognize and distinguish such isomers is to separate their ions according to their different ion mobilities.
Nowadays, the mobility of ions is often measured via their drift velocities through stationary gases under the influence of an electric field. Long drift tubes are filled with an inert, stationary gas (such as helium, nitrogen or argon). The ions of the substance under investigation are pulled through the gas by means of an homogeneous electric field, which is produced by suitable DC potentials applied to ring electrodes arranged along the drift region. The friction with the gas results in a constant drift velocity vd for each ion species which is proportional to the electric field strength E: vd=μ×E. The proportionality factor μ is called the “ion mobility” of the ion species. The ion mobility μ is a function of the gas temperature, gas pressure, type of gas, ion charge and, in particular, the collision cross-section of the ions.
The ion mobility resolving power (“mobility resolution” for short) is defined as dimensionless numbers Rmob=μ/Δμ, where Δμ is the width of the ion signal of the mobility μ at half height, measured in units of ion mobility. Compared to the numerical values for similarly defined mass resolutions in high resolution mass spectrometers, amounting usually to many ten thousands, the ion mobility resolutions which can be achieved in practice are generally very low. The first commercial combination of ion mobility spectrometer and mass spectrometer for bioorganic ions has a maximum mobility resolution of only Rmob=40. With a mobility resolution of Rmob=40, two ion species whose collision cross-sections differ by only five percent can be separated very well. Only highly specialized groups of scientists have, as yet, been able to achieve significantly higher mobility resolutions than Rmob=100, in rare individual cases up to Rmob=200, making it possible to differentiate between ion species whose mobilities differ by only one to two percent. Ion mobility spectrometers with a resolution above Rmob=100 shall be called “high resolution” here.
High-resolution time-of-flight mass spectrometers with orthogonal injection of the ions (OTOF-MS), in particular, have proven successful for combinations of mobility spectrometers with mass spectrometers. For such combinations, the high-resolution ion mobility spectrometers of the ion drift type have the disadvantage of being several meters long. Such a solution is unfavorable for instruments marketed commercially. Even ion mobility spectrometers with a straight drift region offering only moderate resolution are about one meter long. For the construction of small, high-resolution mobility analyzers, one therefore has to look for a solution which shortens the overall length but does not diminish the mobility resolution.
In document U.S. Pat. No. 7,838,826 B1 (M. A. Park, 2008), an ion mobility spectrometer is presented as newest state of the art, the size of which amounts to about ten centimeters only. It is based upon the well-known effect of moving gases blowing ions against and over an electric counter-field barrier instead of pulling ions through a stationary gas. The instrument of M. A. Park is designed into a modified ion funnel built into a commercial time-of-flight mass spectrometer. Unlike many other trials to build small ion mobility spectrometers, the device by M. A. Park has already achieved ion mobility resolutions in excess of Rmob=100, exhibiting high mobility resolution.
The apparatus of M. A. Park and its operation are schematically illustrated in FIGS. 1A to 1D. FIG. 1B shows, how the parts (10) and (12) of a quadrupolar funnel, open as usual to the flow of gas between the electrodes, are separated by a closed quadrupole device (11), vertically sliced into thin electrodes (17, 18) forming a circular tube arranged around the z-axis of the device. The electrode slices are separated by insulating material closing the gaps between the electrodes around the tube. FIG. 1A shows the shape of the electrodes of the funnel (15, 16) in a direction normal to the z-axis and the shape of the electrodes in a direction normal to the z-axis that form the quadrupole tube (17, 18), the latter with equipotential lines of the radially quadrupolar RF field inside the tube at a given time. A differential pumping system of a mass spectrometer (not shown) surrounds the ion mobility spectrometer and is dimensioned to cause a gas to flow, at pressures between several tens to hundreds of pascals, constantly through the tube (11) in a laminar way, thereby causing the gas flow to assume the usual parabolic velocity profile (14). Ions entering the first funnel (10) entrained in a gas, are focused onto the axis of the tube (11) by the pseudopotential forces of the quadrupolar RF field and move, driven by the gas, along the axis of the tube towards its exit through the apertured diaphragm (13). Most of the gas escapes through gaps between the electrodes of the funnel part (12).
An ion funnel (10) or (12) usually is operated with apertured diaphragms the openings of which taper to smaller diameters thus forming an inner volume in the shape of a funnel. Two phases of an RF voltage are applied alternately to the diaphragms to build up a pseudopotential which keeps the ions away from the funnel walls. The ion funnel entrance part (10) and exit part (12) are here built from electrodes which are divided into four parts to allow a more complicated RF field to be applied, but this is not essential for the operation of this ion mobility spectrometer.
FIGS. 1C and 1D show, in two diagrams, different DC potential profiles P (22) to (26) along the z-axis, and corresponding barriers of the electric counter field Ez=dP/dz, respectively. The potential profiles are produced by a network of precisely chosen resistors between the electrode slices, operating as voltage dividers. In this way, only a single voltage has to be applied and forms the complete profile; changing this voltage changes the potential profiles (22 to 26) and change the height of the electric barriers as a whole.
The operation of the ion mobility spectrometer will be described by the sequence in which the potential profiles are changed. The operation starts with a filling process. The steepest potential profile (22) is generated by a voltage in the order of 100 to 200 volt, producing the highest electric field barrier. The ions (27) are blown by the gas flow against the field barrier and are stopped there because they cannot surmount the field barrier. Ions with high mobility gather at the foot of the barrier, ions with high collision cross section (low mobility) gather near the summit, as symbolically indicated by the size of the ion dots (27). When a suitable number of ions have been collected, further ions are prevented from entering the ion mobility spectrometer, e.g., by reversing the DC potential gradient in the ion funnel (10). In order to acquire a spectrum, the potential profile (22) is smoothly lowered by decreasing the voltage continuously in a procedure denominated a “scan” (28), through profile states (23) to (26). During the scan, ions of higher and higher mobilities can surmount the decreasing summit of the barrier and exit the ion mobility spectrometer. They are measured by an ion detector, favorably by a mass spectrometer. The measured ion current curve presents directly the ion mobility spectrum from low ion mobilities to high ion mobilities. This device is denominated a “TIMS”, or “trapped ion mobility spectrometer”.
A characteristic feature of this instrument is the long increasing part of the electric field barrier until position (20), the start of the plateau as shown in FIG. 1D. This long ascent between foot and top of the barrier collects the ions (27) in a rather large volume along the z-axis, reducing greatly any space charge effects.
Another characteristic feature of this instrument is the flat plateau of the height of the electric field barrier between positions (20) and (21) on the z-axis, also shown in FIG. 1D. If the barrier is lowered slowly during an acquisition, ions have to dwell, for about a millisecond while passing the flat plateau, in a critical balance between the pushing force of the hundreds of gas collisions and the retarding force of the electric counter field, before they are finally blown from the end of the plateau into weaker field regions. In this millisecond, a high number of gas collisions causes a statistically equal selection of all ions of the same mobility, resulting in the high mobility resolution.
With this instrument, the ion mobility resolution Rmob was found to increase with decreasing acquisition speed. Ion mobilities in excess of Rmob=100 have been achieved with the small apparatus in first experiments, but only by very slow scanning, allowing only for low repetition rates of the instrument's spectrum acquisition. Furthermore, with extremely slow acquisition speeds, the noise in the ion current peaks for ions of one mobility are drastically increased, because there are generally only a few ions per peak, and these ions are distributed over a longer period of time, resulting in a torn structure of the peak.
It should be mentioned here, that there are other types of short ion mobility spectrometers using gas flows. Document US 2010/0,090,102 A1 (O. Raether et al, 2008) describes, how a freely expanding gas flow from a small opening can be used to drive entrained ions over an electrical barrier within an ion funnel without quadrupolar RF field. In document GB 2473723 A (J. Franzen, 2009), an apparatus is presented which generates a supersonic gas flow by a Laval nozzle, the supersonic gas flow driving entrained ions over an electrical barrier. In this case, the supersonic gas flow with entrained ions is not enclosed by any radially confining field, particularly not by an RF multipole field.